Tag Archives: Asheville

Side view of the Hundred Year Old Cabin, Arden, NC.

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday, but this year has gone by so fast (and because of the continued cold weather, I was having trouble believing spring had really arrived), so I almost forgot about her birthday. It just sort of snuck up on me. So I realized yesterday I hadn’t made any plans or gotten her anything.

I stopped by a cupcake shop on the way home and got six different types of cupcakes, then had her pick her favorite one (red velvet cake). Then I placed a candle on top of it and brought it out to her while we sang happy birthday (I did not get a picture of that but I should have — the cupcakes were adorable and so colorful).

Then I told her I wanted to go for a drive and wanted company. What I had in mind was a 3 mile trip to some river cabins I’d always been curious to see. She and her boyfriend joined me, thinking the trip would be boring, but it wasn’t at all!

There are seven adorable rental cabins tucked away in the woods by the river. Six of them are new, and all perfectly charming (we could actually go inside two of them), but the one that fascinated me the most was the Hundred Year Old Cabin. We didn’t get to see the inside of it, but it’s very photogenic, as you can see below.

Back view of the Hundred Year Old Cabin

Front view of the Hundred Year Old Cabin

Two photos of one of the newer river cabins.

We got to try out the hammock on one of the cabins closest to the river. It was a beautiful day, and so relaxing just swinging in it and hearing all the nature sounds. It was hard to believe I wasn’t on vacation and only a few miles from my home .

We walked around the campgrounds for a while and took some pictures of the river, then we headed to Panera Bread for her birthday dinner.

I wasn’t able to attend the Womens March that took place in downtown Asheville today, but the day was beautiful (sunny, high 50’s) and the turnout was unbelievable! My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw this photo (which I was informed later is actually from 2017, but the turnout was the same or even greater than last year’s).

Asheville is a very progressive (deep, deep indigo blue!) bastion in a mostly red state (though a lot of the “redness” is misleading, since the GOP gerrymandering here is the worst in the nation. There are actually quite a few blue/Democratic areas in North Carolina, particularly in the urban areas.

But I’m fortunate to live in what is probably the most politically progressive city in the state, outside of the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, which is full of colleges and universities. Asheville has a couple of colleges, but higher education isn’t its main draw. We’re a haven for artists, musicians, people involved in the healing arts, and other creative types, and people from other areas of the country seeking the vibrant culture here as well as the beautiful scenery and the weather — we have all 4 seasons, but the winters are generally milder than what you find farther north and the summers are not that hot because of our location in the mountains.

The turnout in this small city (population about 89,000) was incredible. It might as well have been in a big city like New York or Chicago!

Beautiful weather, beautiful city, beautiful people. I’m proud to live in Asheville even though I wasn’t able to attend the march today. I’m thrilled that the resistance seems to be growing even after a year of Trump, and proud of my fellow Ashevillians.

Actually, most of them aren’t true Russians, they are Slavic people from Eastern Europe, especially The Ukraine, which was once under Soviet rule, so that probably explains some of the confusion.

Eastern Europeans began to flood Buncombe County during the 1990s, with Asheville being at the center of the immigration activity. In the past decade or so, Slavs have become such a large chunk of the demographic here that signs in most of the downtown public buildings, such as the courthouse and the health department, are in English, Spanish, and Russian (or Ukrainian, which I think is similar to Russian and uses the same Cyrillic alphabet–I can’t tell the difference!).

Some long-time residents of this area complain about the huge influx of the “Russians,” as they do about the large Mexican population already established here. Personally I find both groups add a lot to the culture, and don’t cause any problems at all. In the case of the Ukrainians (to my understanding, the largest group of Slavs moving to Asheville and Buncombe County), they are escaping from an intolerable situation in their own country, where Ukrainians, in spite of declaring their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, are facing religious abuse and their country is being torn apart by opposing political forces which are outside the interests of freedom. Here is an article (about a year old) from the Asheville Citizen-Times that goes into more detail about the discord going on in the Ukraine.

Sadly, this attitude is pretty common. The new immigrants aren’t even technically Russian.

Why have so many Eastern Europeans chosen the Asheville area as their destination? I’m not sure, but I think it could have something to do with the similar climate and terrain in the Southern Appalachians (the entire Appalachian range runs from Georgia through Maine) to parts of Eastern Europe (even though their climate is somewhat more continental and less humid–and has colder winters). The Southern Appalachians have been compared by many people to the Carpathians which run through the Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia, and one of the counties next to Buncombe County is even called Transylvania County due to it’s appearance. The 2003 movie “Cold Mountain,” a civil war epic about people living in western North Carolina during the mid 19th century and later, was actually filmed in Romania (it was cheaper to film it there, and the Carpathians are less untouched by modernity than the Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains). I’ve seen photos of the Carpathians, and it’s almost spooky how similar they look to this part of the US!

Which one is the Blue Ridge Mountains? (Click on the photos and the picture titles will tell you which is which).

The culture of the mountain people in both areas also have similarities. There’s an organization called the Carpathian-Appalachian Conference which holds meetings and sponsors educational and other events that seek to understand the similarities and differences between the two cultures.

I took some photos around Asheville, North Carolina yesterday and today. Yesterday’s photos are the sunny ones. Today’s are the ones with the trippy looking sky. It’s warmed up quite a bit, with temperatures above freezing for the first time in a week.

If you click this photo to make it larger and look closely at the left hand side where the land meets the sky, you can see the top of Mount Mitchell, part of the Black Mountain range of the Blue Ridge, and the highest peak on the East Coast. It’s covered with snow.

Other snowy photos from yesterday:

The sky is on hallucinogens! (these photos are from today)
These photos don’t quite capture the almost otherworldly weirdness of the sky today. These are not storm clouds. I don’t know the name of these wavy clouds but they are shaped by wind currents.
Click the photos to enlarge.

A mile away, the snow was blowing so hard there was practically no visibility and I thought my car would blow off the road. But here, I caught a couple of photos of the French Broad River on the way home from work just before the snow and wind began to hit. There was still a little patchy sun.

I snapped these photos in the Ingles parking lot while loading groceries in my car. It was somewhat warm today and sunny, and I just loved the look of the sky just before sunset. The photos don’t really capture the beauty of the colors in the sky at the time but it was magical.